CoxHealth heads to eFactory to develop innovative ideas

There are few fields that experience change as rapidly as health care. Between changes in regulation; advances in science, medicine and technology; and new public health challenges, the sands are ever shifting.

And few are as aware of that as Scott Rogers, CoxHealth’s system director for performance integration and innovation.

Rogers said he and other members of CoxHealth’s leadership team were looking for ways to encourage innovative ideas to bubble up from front-line employees.

“We talked about a crowd-sourcing concept and then all of the sudden — I go to 1 Million Cups a lot at the eFactory — and Jim Anderson (CoxHealth’s vice president of marketing and public affairs) said, ‘You should talk with them about what they’re doing with that stuff,’” Rogers recalled.

“That stuff” was all of the support, guidance and education Missouri State University’s eFactory gives startups, small businesses and entrepreneurs.

Given the size of the CoxHealth network, it might seem to be a mismatch at first blush, but the more Rogers talked it over with Rachel Anderson, entrepreneurial specialist at the eFactory, the more it made sense.

They began with the idea of eFactory’s annual Startup Weekend, an intense three-day event in which budding entrepreneurs pitch an idea on Friday and spend the weekend refining it. Final pitches are made on Sunday in a competition to see whose idea will win.

“We’ve done Startup Weekends, but this is the first we’ve done for a company the size of CoxHealth,” Anderson said.

Anderson and others modified the Startup Weekend idea to fit the needs of CoxHealth. What they came up with was the CoxHealth Innovation Accelerator, which took place during the afternoon and evening of Feb. 29 and March 1.

Rogers explained CoxHealth held an open application process for employees. More than 100 employees expressed interest in participating. Of those, 50 were chosen. Rogers said they wanted a blend of 25 of the 50 participants to be front-line employees, 20 to be middle management and five to be system leaders.

Everyone who attended had one minute to present his or her idea for fixing a problem or making things better.

Getting ideas put together.(Photo: Submitted Photo)

“We really didn’t know how that was going to play out,” Rogers says, noting 50 ideas is a lot to cram into one hour.

But it worked. After all the pitches were made, everyone voted for their favorites. Eventually, the teams worked their way down to the top seven ideas.

“They started working and they could work as late as they wanted that night. It reopened at 7 a.m. and they had all day to … do the best they could to turn that idea into a business plan without a lot of data,” Rogers said, noting there simply wasn’t time to gather a lot of data.

“They were very creative,” Rogers says of CoxHealth employees. “… Some of them were way out there and some of them were very patient-centric … and some of them were business ideas, some community ideas. We were very impressed,” he said.

Once the top seven ideas were refined, they were presented to the judges, CoxHealth’s senior leadership team, who voted to determine the top three. “We’re going to figure out how do we bring those to life,” Rogers said. Those ideas involve how to expand laboratory services, different things CoxHealth can do with pharmacy services and how to better meet the challenges of chronic health management.

But more than those three ideas came out of the exercise.

“I think there were 13 we flagged that we’re going to just do,” he said.

Anderson said these types of exercises on neutral ground facilitated by experts in the field of entrepreneurship are great for nurturing employee creativity.

“I think it’s huge when you have this type of environment inside a company, you want everyone to feel empowered to effect change or make things work a little bit better,” she said.

In larger companies, it can be hard to get those innovative ideas to percolate upward from the front line. But “with startups, those ideas have to come because you have to keep innovating to survive,” she said.

“It’s easier for us to do that because it’s the world we live in,” Anderson said.

Rogers said CoxHealth likely will repeat the exercise and encourages other organizations to do the same.

“That eFactory team was great. I think anyone could internalize this to their own organization. They just have to be willing to invest the time and invest the resources and bring people together,” he said.

Jake McWay, CoxHealth senior vice president and CFO; Steve Edwards, CoxHealth president and CEO; and CoxHealth board member Jack Prim, CEO of Jack Henry & Associates. They were three of the judges during the final presentations.(Photo: Submitted Photo)